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For a Preview of the Border Wall, Look to California

The United States-Mexico border fence in Southern California, looking west.Credit
Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

SAN DIEGO — On a dusty patch of land surrounded by a chain-link fence near the border here, workers this week began shoveling ground for a large-scale prototype for a border wall with Mexico.

The eight different models of President Trump’s promised wall will range from 18 to 30 feet tall. Four will be made of concrete and four will use “other materials.” They are being built in a carefully protected area not far from a field, where, decades ago, Mexican migrants once openly gathered before crossing into the United States illegally.

But in many ways a preview for a wall, and what it can and cannot accomplish, has been here for nearly two decades. Stretching roughly 20 miles along the southern edge of California and into the Pacific Ocean are two layers of steel and concrete, the toughest barrier in the country.

The state has long been at the center of the debate over how to stop illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America. Now, the rest of the country is once again turning to the region that has long grappled with border security to see what the future of enforcement might look like.

And despite California’s role as the epicenter for opposition to Mr. Trump, the administration apparently never considered placing the models of a would-be wall anywhere else.

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Walking toward the entry gate to Mexico at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.Credit
Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

Perhaps nobody relishes the region’s return to the spotlight as much as Representative Duncan D. Hunter, a Republican whose district covers suburban and rural San Diego. Mr. Hunter’s father also represented the area for years in Congress, spending much of his time in office pushing for more and stronger barriers on the border. Mr. Hunter calls the current fence a “shining example of what a border wall could do.”

“I told Trump that if you want to look at a model, it’s done, it’s in San Diego where you have almost no illegal immigration,” Mr. Hunter said. “Call it a fence, call it a wall. It’s completely changed the area and made the border safe to live.”

Indeed, illegal immigration here has slowed to barely a trickle. The number of migrants apprehended in the region while trying to cross illegally is now about 5 percent of what it once was: roughly 32,000 a year compared to a peak of nearly 630,000 in 1986, according to the United States Border Patrol.

But many of the migrants have gone elsewhere, to more dangerous and deadly routes through Arizona and the Rio Grande Valley. And immigration from Mexico over all has declined drastically, as a bustling economy has convinced many not to move north. The infrastructure and enforcement has cost billions of dollars — not only to build the barriers, but also to continually repair and patrol them.

Just a few miles from where the prototypes are going up, Dick Tynan can easily see a hill on the other side of the Mexican border from the front lawn of his small horse ranch where he has lived for decades. On a recent evening, he recalled how two decades ago he used to pull out a lawn chair to watch the hundreds of men and women gather on the hill every afternoon and wait for sunset, when they would run across the border and down into the ranches and stables that line the small river here.

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Agents at the San Ysidro port patrol the snaking lines.Credit
Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

So many people would play soccer on the patch of dirt while they waited that the area was named the “soccer field” — a term many locals still use, though it has been decades since any games have been played there.

In the 1980s, roughly half of all Mexican immigrants to the United States came through Tijuana, and the overwhelming majority went through the soccer field, according to research from El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a think tank in Tijuana.

“There’d be a mess of people all the time; it was just chaos. You’d watch them come down — there was nobody going after them. It was open season,” Mr. Tynan said. “It didn’t matter what we said, who we complained to. There was just nothing anyone did about it.”

But then he watched a fence go up in the 1990s: First came sheet metal — surplus helicopter landing pads turned on their side — then concrete columns that reached up to 18 feet. Now there is razor wire, and border patrol agents on horses or in trucks keep watch along the road every day, sometimes every hour. Eventually the immigrants stopped crossing where he could see them.

Today, one of the most prominent features of the area is the sprawling outlet mall that abuts the barbed-wire barrier. A tidy subdivision of stucco homes is just across the street.

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The border at San Ysidro in 1993.Credit
Sandy Huffaker

No other section of the border is subject to as much monitoring and has as many physical barriers as the San Diego area’s, which is supported by double-layer fencing, stadium lighting and video surveillance. San Ysidro, the point of entry here, remains the busiest border crossing in the country; half of all entries into the United States pass through it. After years of complaints of long waits from drivers from Mexico, a $740 million expansion of the vehicle crossing is now underway, intended to increase cross-border business.

“There has been a massive effort and expense to create a border that is unlike anything else,” said Wayne Cornelius, a professor at University of California, San Diego, who has studied the region for decades. “What it did more than anything is reroute the flows. It created a balloon effect to send people elsewhere and pay smugglers more to get them through.”

In the 1990s, images of immigrants dashing over the border and running across freeways were captured by news cameras and replayed night after night on television, fueling a fierce debate over who should be allowed in and how. Politicians — both Democrats and Republicans — from all parts of the country trekked here to denounce what they saw as unfettered illegal immigration.

“Anyone who lives here remembers the time when they would wake up to someone in the backyard or garage,” said Mayor Serge Dedina of Imperial Beach, who grew up in the area and remembers a time when the border was viewed almost as a combat zone, with hundreds of migrants regularly entering illegally. “We’re nothing like that anymore. The reality is that very little about the border here feels the same now.”

This time around, though, the political climate is very different. Opponents to the wall say that the barrier here was just one small factor in driving down the number of immigrants coming through illegally, arguing that the strong Mexican economy has been the major factor keeping would-be migrants from crossing. A wall through most of the southern border, they say, would move people and drugs to the most rugged terrain, as it has done here.

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Mark Endicott, a Border Patrol agent, at the end of the border fence, in East Otay Mesa, Calif.Credit
Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

California officials have continued to resist, arguing that there is already strict enforcement at the border and that a wall would do little more than antagonize Mexican allies. Last week, State Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit claiming that the plan to build a wall violated federal environmental laws and relied on statutes that do not authorize such projects in the area.

“If you take Trump at his word, he’s talking about some big medieval structure — a wall is a wall is a wall,” Mr. Becerra said in an interview. “We’re now in the 21st century and realize that there are all kinds of barriers that combine to give true border security, which is something all of us want. But we’ve jumped beyond medieval walls.”

Local officials are also bracing themselves for what some believe could be huge protests near the building area, like those at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation over the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Mr. Trump has given mixed messages on just what the wall would look like, recently saying that it would need to have “transparency.” Customs and Border Protection officials are not releasing any renderings or details of the prototypes, which were chosen from hundreds of proposals. The prototypes will cost between $300,000 and $500,000 each; estimates for a wall along the entire 2,000 mile border are in the tens of billions of dollars.

Despite California’s tough enforcement apparatus, problems with the border still exist: The flow of drugs, weapons and would-be migrants is a daily reality. Earlier that morning, before sunrise, one of the patrol dogs alerted officers to a 2010 Chevy Cobalt as a 52-year-old American citizen waited to drive it through the checkpoint. When officers examined the car, they found 31 packages of methamphetamine wrapped in plastic and hidden inside the rear bumper. On the street, officers said, the three-dozen pounds of drugs would fetch about $115,000.

“There’s a persistence of criminal organizations that are constantly trying to get drugs on the other side,” said Mark Endicott, a Border Patrol agent who has worked in the region for decades. “We’re dealing with low-level players who are constantly figuring out ways to change what they are doing to avoid getting caught.”

“If it wasn’t effective they wouldn’t try it,” Mr. Endicott said.

While few try to reach above the eight-foot-tall fence that blocks the roughly 15 miles between San Diego and Tijuana, many still try to go beneath it and smugglers are routinely caught. In the last decade, drug cartels have created highly sophisticated tunnels in the region to get drugs through. For agents like Mr. Endicott, patrolling the border can still feel like a cat-and-mouse game: The officers change how they guard, and the smugglers change what they do.

“Maybe one day there will finally be concertina wire over everything,” Mr. Endicott said. “It slows people down, but so far nothing we have done has stopped people from trying.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 28, 2017, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Problems and Promise Of Wall Are on Display In Southern California. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe